Stargazing

The consequences of this neglect can be found in almost any
newspaper article bemoaning America's scientific illiteracy. Fewer than
half of American adults know that the Earth goes around the sun once a
year. Very few people can explain the phases of the moon or the reasons
for eclipses. Most people go about their lives paying little attention
to the dazzling spectacle that appears after the sun sets in a
cloudless sky.

Is that such a disaster? No matter what scientists might say,
scientific literacy remains a luxury for most people. They can get by
without knowing much about the nuclear reactions that occur in the sun,
the Earth's carbon cycle, or the biochemical mechanisms responsible for
life.

But people who aren't familiar with astronomy might be missing more
than they think. The Earth's journeys around the sun are the measure of
our mortality. The hormonal cycles of half the human race march in time
to the phases of the moon. And the stories that echo in the stars are a
highlight of our species' cultural heritage. As the essayist Thomas
Carlyle once lamented, "Why did not somebody teach me the
constellations and make me at home in the starry heavens?"

Astronomy also offers an excellent way of attracting kids to
science. Learning about the solar system and stars can show even young
children how much fun it is to discover new things about the world.
Maybe their interest does reside partly in their fascination with
flying saucers and spacemen. But many prominent scientists say that
they got interested in science exactly the same way.

My own children are lucky. Though astronomy is not a formal part of
the curriculum in the Montgomery County school district, the 2nd grade
teachers at Burning Tree, our neighborhood elementary school, have put
together an astronomy module that is the highlight of their students'
year. For four weeks, all the 2nd graders undergo astronaut training in
preparation for a promised trip to the moon. "What we try to do is
capture their spirit of discovery," says Helene Granof, a medical
technician turned elementary school teacher who developed the module
for Burning Tree. "If we can introduce these concepts in a way that's
fun, they'll get a lot out of it—even if they don't understand
everything."

Over the course of their training, the 2nd graders do dances to
learn about the difference between the Earth's spin and its orbit
around the sun. They draw pictures of the moon each day for a month.
They read folk tales about the moon, study its geography, and plan
their trip. Then, on launch day, they go to a darkened stage, watch a
movie about Apollo 11, and emerge to find six stations in the
auditorium where they do everything from sample astronaut ice cream to
calculate their moon weights. Says Granof: "When they leave this school
at the end of the 5th grade, many of them say that what they remember
best is their trip to the moon."

Opinions differ on how much astronomy elementary school children are
able to learn. Many younger students do not have the spatial sense
needed to picture the detailed workings of the solar system. Attempts
to teach even 4th and 5th graders ideas like why the moon has phases
often end in failure.

Yet educators and scientists also trace many future problems with
astronomical concepts directly to the elementary years. "You have to
get them interested as children," says Lucy McFadden, an astronomer at
the University of Maryland who has most recently been involved in an
effort to establish a new science and technology center in the state.
"If you don't start them when they're young—at piano or
mathematics or school or whatever—they probably won't get
interested later on."

The misconceptions that develop among elementary school children can
be remarkably resilient. In making the videotape A Private
Universe, producer Matthew Schneps and Phil Sadler, head of science
education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, asked 23
Harvard University seniors, faculty, and alumni on graduation day to
explain the seasons and phases of the moon. With the supreme
self-confidence borne of a Harvard education, 21 got it wrong.

The videotape also spends a fair amount of time with a high school
student named Heather. Described as an exceptionally bright young woman
by her teacher, Heather nevertheless makes a hash of her explanations
of basic astronomical concepts. She draws the orbit of the Earth around
the sun as a curlicue. She says that the seasons are caused by the
sun's rays bouncing off other objects before they hit the Earth. It's
"mind-boggling," says her teacher, watching Heather perform. "You
assume that they know certain things."

Actually, even the youngest students do know a lot about
astronomy. But what they know is often wrong.

Actually, even the youngest students do know a lot about astronomy. But
what they know is often wrong. Over the past two decades, researchers
have shown that preschoolers and elementary school children develop
very definite ideas about the universe based on their everyday
observations of the world. But the theories are not correct because
children have not been "Copernicanized," as University of Illinois
psychologist William Brewer puts it. "Adults might think that these
ideas are dumbheaded, but I don't think so," Brewer says. "Kids are
good little scientists. They use the data they have and develop their
own theories."

Brewer and other developmental psychologists have documented many of
the ideas about the cosmos that children construct as they grow. Most
children begin thinking that the Earth is flat because that is what
they see around them. Then, beginning in elementary school, they
undergo what Brewer calls "a slow, difficult, agonizing battle to try
to make sense of what adults are telling them."

For example, told that the Earth is round, many children picture it
as a disk. In sailing around the world, Columbus sailed around the edge
of the disk. Later, some children think that if the Earth is a sphere,
we live inside where the candle would go in a jack-o'-lantern.

Finally, most children begin to grasp that we live on the surface of
a sphere. But in that case, many conclude, the sun must be going around
the Earth because that's what their eyes tell them. "It's remarkable,"
says Brewer. "Here we have kids who don't know anything about the
history of astronomy, and using their own observations they construct a
Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology."

The best way to dispel these preconceptions, according to astronomy
educators, is to concentrate intensively on a limited number of
fundamental astronomical concepts. At the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics, Bruce Ward and his colleagues have developed a
curriculum for elementary school children that focuses on "a few big
ideas as deeply as possible"—subjects like the connections
between the Earth's motions and our measures of time. By exploring the
central concepts thoroughly, Ward says, kids recognize the fallacies of
their ideas and develop new, more accurate worldviews.

Ward's curriculum, called Astronomy Resources for Elementary
Science, or ARIES, also emphasizes the building of simple, inexpensive
models. By working with their own models, students engage in the kind
of "discovery-based learning," says Ward, that cannot be achieved
through textbooks and chalk talk.

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